Why should anything exist at all, when it would seem at first glance to be much simpler, and much more sensible, for nothing to have existed at all? That is,

Why does there exist anything? Why a world with its stars, its planets, its humans, its atoms — why these or any other such items? Why couldn’t they all vanish, one after another, and why have there ever been any of them instead of utter emptiness? The puzzle can make our minds dizzy, can fill us with awe. (p. 1)

 

 

 In this deep and thoughtful book, philosopher John Leslie and public sage Robert Lawrence Kuhn organize, integrate, and reassess past and current ideas about this most compelling of metaphysical questions. It is a question that has run through philosophy since earliest times, although it appears to have been asked formally only when Leibniz laid it out in his tract, On the Ultimate Origins of Things, in the waning years of the seventeenth century. (The relevant section of Leibniz’s treatise is excerpted and discussed inthis book.) Since Leibniz’s time, however, as natural philosophy and then modern physics have begun to provide increasingly better methods of making potentially useful empirical evidence available for philosophers to argue about, the question has been tackled repeatedly, and the variety of answers have brought the outlines of the issue into much clearer focus — better focus, no doubt, but whether progress has been made toward an answer remains unclear, as this book so well demonstrates.

 Some might claim that’s because the question just isn’t answerable. As Jim Holt (2010) observed recently in his own book, Why Does the World Exist,

 ….Why is there something rather than nothing?  “No scientific theory, it seems, can bridge the gulf between absolute nothingness and a full-fledged universe,” the scientifically inclined religious apologist Roy Abraham Varghese has written. “This ultimate origin question is a metascientific question–one which science can ask but not answer.” (p. 6)

 And it does seem possible, perhaps even likely, this it is not a question that empirical science can address, but for those of us who continue nonetheless to grapple with this question, Leslie and Kuhn have produced a precise, readable, carefully crafted compendium. The deceptively slim book (at 288 pages it’s closely typeset and heftier than it appears) contains relatively brief but carefully-selected excerpts from the writings of almost 50 other thinkers, philosophers and scientists, along with analysis and commentary by Leslie and Kuhn. The list of those whose ideas are presented and critiqued include ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus; medieval thinkers such as Aquinas; pre-modern philosophers including Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume; philosophers of our own time such as Bertrand Russell, Derek Parfit, Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Nagel, Richard Swinburne, John Polkinghorne and Robert Nozick; and even physicists who are willing to (or feel compelled to) weigh in on this metaphysical issue, such as Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, and Paul Davies.

 The possible approaches to settling the question of “why not nothing” are cataloged in two different configurations in the book: a broad grouping at the beginning of the book, and a richer listing at the conclusion. The first grouping of potential answers can be summarized like this:

 1.    The question is illegitimate (unanswerable, improperly formed).

 2.    The answer is beyond our capacity to understand.

 3.    Existence is a brute fact, period.

 4.    Existence is explained by reference to God.

 5.    Because of a natural principle of creativity in reality (a “nomological” answer.)

 6.    Because of philosophic necessity (a “necessitarian” approach).

 (Note that the first “answer” isn’t really an answer at all.)

 At the end of the book, after several hundred pages of sometimes mind-boggling excerpts preceded by or interspersed with Leslie and Kuhn’s helpful context, the list of possible answers to Leibniz’s question has grown to 27 – actually only 26 if the first (that it’s a meaningless question) is ruled out. Among the remaining 26, a few still seem to beg or sideswipe the question and can (in my opinion) be set aside; but among those worth pondering are the Brute Fact assumption, Theism, Deism, Pantheism, Multiple Universes, Causal Consciousness, Platonic Forms, and Reality-as-Simulation.

 After the first chapters properly set the stage for the reader, each of the chapters beginning with Chapter 4 takes a related group of possible answers, provides an introduction and preparation, and then the excerpts by primary authors. I found that the commentaries by Kuhn and Leslie are invaluable and objective, and that it’s best to work through them first, before tackling the excerpts themselves.

 One example of an idea taken seriously by some (see Chapter 6) but that may seem singularly unpersuasive to non-professionals, is that since there are many ways – perhaps an infinite number of ways – for something to exist, and only one way for nothing to be the case (meaning the absence of all things), then obviously it’s infinitely more likely for something rather than nothing to exist. Perhaps this is a deeper argument than it seems.

 Although the reader is well advised to keep an open mind when reading each of these ideas, I found especially intriguing the ideas in Chapter 8, the possibility that consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality, perhaps even a co-creator of reality. A few decades ago this idea was clearly articulated by physicist Max Planck, and with the trail toward a physicalist understanding of the origin and role of consciousness seemingly leading nowhere at present, apparently this elusive idea is gaining a bit of ground. (Also see, e.g., Hoffman or Kuhlmann.)

 The final chapter of the book is especially satisfying. Here the authors consider whether, after all the rough terrain the reader has passed through, the problem still seems real and significant. This chapter includes a concise piece by Nozick, and also two of Parfit’s lengthy essays that were originally printed in The London Review of Books: “Why Anything? Why this?” Like Leslie and Kuhn, Parfit is especially talented in presenting complex ideas in plain language.

 This last chapter includes one of the most profound sections of the book, an essay by Kuhn himself. This is where the second categorizing of ideas that I mentioned above is set forth – the 26 (plus one) possible approaches to the question of “why not nothing”. Here Kuhn also lists nine “levels” of nothingness, which helps clarify the different meanings that the various thinkers have given to this concept. It might have been helpful to have placed this list at the beginning of the book, though, since the layperson’s simplistic idea of what “nothing” means isn’t at all adequate to include the diverse types that “nothingness experts” are able to come up with.

 I would point out that implicit in the search that drives this book is another, equally compelling philosophical question: How should we live our lives? What does it all mean? Traditionally these have been seen as questions of ethics, but after fully appreciating this book by Leslie and Kuhn, it’s clear that these are just as much questions of ontology, for how can we find meaning in our own individual lives, if we haven’t come to terms with the question of why the universe (or universes) exist in the first place?

 (Note: As a bonus for buying this book, the reader also acquires an extensive bibliography of hundreds of relevant books and other material. Also worth noting is Kuhn’s compelling, beautifully filmed video series of interviews with leading thinkers, freely accessed at www.closertotruth.com.)

 

 © 2013 Keith Harris

 

Keith Harris, Ph.D., is Chief of Research for the Department of Behavioral Health in San Bernardino County, California. His current interests include the empirical basis for mental health research, behavioral genetics, and the shaping of human nature by evolutionary forces.